Over the past couple weeks I’ve been working with AI tools to explore the experience of time, with a focus on literary representations. And then I’ve included the artifacts of that work as input for other experiments with AI tools. Without going down the path of how I worked my way from comparing Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida to comparing Strether in James’ The Ambassadors to Jean Valjean in Hugo’s Les Misérables, I’ll just jump to the punchline. AI created this table in a slide from a presentation about “Architecting Trust” in organizations pursuing AI projects. It won’t make it into the final pitch deck, but it’s sort of accidentally brilliant.

The Technical Codex: Two Models of Time

Strether (The Perception of Time)	Valjean (The Vocation of Action)
Concept: Time as consciousness. Love as an aesthetic experience.	Concept: Time grounded in eternity. Love as a vocation enacted in the sewers of Paris.
Action: Redeeming time by finally, fully perceiving a present moment. The quiet sorrow of arriving too late.	Action: Redeeming time through action. Moving through the world bending the machinery of contingency to protect others.

For the most part I assess LLMs’ abilities to interpret literature as about as good as a talented undergraduate English major, one that is eager to please and get to the right answer. But once in awhile, there’s a student in class who can use wit and humor to shape insights and open up multiple, rich interpretations of a work. Sometimes they say outrageous things they don’t even fully understand but still display genius like a savant.

Valjean’s journey through the sewers to save Marius is epic, sublime sacrifice and as intensely scary and disturbing as any scene Stephen King has written. And “Love as a vocation enacted in the sewers of Paris” is a great jumping off point for a conversation about everything that novel does.